At age sixteen, James grew-up fast when his father died. He played baseball in high school and received a college scholarship. Concerned about his mother and brothers, he hoped his athletic talent would lead to a financially successful professional baseball career. Then, one day, while playing a pick-up football game, James was seriously injured and diagnosed a quadriplegic. He asked the doctor, "How bad is it?" The doctor responded, "Bad enough. You'll never walk again and possibly not move from the neck down." Thankfully, God placed James within a family that didn't accept such advice. After years of hard work, fortitude, and perseverance, he was able to return to college. After completing his bachelor's degree, it took him three years to land a teaching contract. Prospective employers saw the wheelchair not the applicant. As an educator, James received teaching and coaching awards. Confident, he decided to return to college. After completing his doctoral degree in May 2011, James became a motivational speaker encouraging other people to triumph over tragedies. He knows all of this would not have been possible without God in his life, his family's support, and his personal values – the desire to succeed in life and overcome adversities.

One of the biggest draws on the sports calendar, the NCAA men's basketball tournament routinely thrills fans with "bracket buster" upsets. From Loyola Marymount's emotional 1990 run following the death of team leader Hank Gathers to UMBC in 2018 becoming the first 16-seed to defeat a 1-seed, March Madness holds the sporting world captive for a few weeks each year and changes the lives of players. Drawing on dozens of original interviews, this book chronicles the tournament's many underdog tournament runs, with insights into the teams beyond their exploits on the hardwood.

This book offers a rich collection of international research narratives that reveal the qualities and value of peer play. It presents new understandings of peer play and relationships in chapters drawn from richly varied contexts that involve sibling play, collaborative peer play, and joint play with adults. The book explores social strategies such as cooperation, negotiation, playing with rules, expressing empathy, and sharing imaginary emotional peer play experiences. Its reconceptualization of peer play and relationships promotes new thinking on children's development in contemporary worlds. It shows how new knowledge generated about young children's play with peers illuminates how they learn and develop within and across communities, families, and educational settings in diverse cultural contexts. The book addresses issues that are relevant for parents, early years' professionals and academics, including the role of play in learning at school, the role of adults in self-initiated play, and the long-term impact of early friendships. The book makes clear how recent cultural differences involve digital, engineering and imaginary peer play. The book follows a clear line of argument highlighting the importance of play-based learning and stress the importance of further knowledge of children's interaction in their context. This book aims to highlight the narration of peer play, mostly leaning on a sociocultural theoretical perspective, where many chapters have a cultural-historical theoretical frame and highlight children's social situation of development. Polly Björk-Willén, Linköping University, Sweden

Stories and rhymes put maths into context and demonstrate concepts in ways meaningful to children. They make maths more relevant, fun and accessible to children, sparking their imagination while developing their mathematical thinking. Developing Early Maths through Story is the new guide to help practitioners feel more confident about teaching early mathematics. Ideal for use with 3-5 years old, the book will encourage young learners to exercise mathematical concepts, both outdoors and indoors, and show practitioners how to help their children and develop their skills creatively. The book contains 14 chapters, on numbers 0 to 13, each including: * A brief outline of a traditional story * EYFS Learning objectives * Resources needed * Suggestions for younger children and babies * Scope for outdoor activities and for using natural materials * Further activities, games and extension questions * Suggestions for using ICT * Assessment opportunities. Ideal for parents and carers who want to explore or extend the learning of maths at home with their children in a very accessible and enjoyable way.

George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) was formative influence on American letters in the first half of this century, and is generally considered the leading drama critic of his era. With H. L. Mencken, Nathan edited The Smart Set and founded and edited The American Mercury, journals that shaped opinion in the 1920s and 1930s. This series of reprints, individually introduced by the distinguished critic and novelist Charles Angoff, collects Nathan's penetrating, witty, and sometimes cynical drama criticism.

How did an angel enter Victor Wolfs life? The answer was simpleat the hockey rink when a little schoolteacher asked a favor of him: to bring her the head of a poisonous snake when he went snake hunting. She didnt look like an angel. The deep discolored circles under her eyes reminded the coach of a raccoon. She looked as though she hadnt had a good nights sleep in a while. The tough hockey coach didnt look much better. He also had circles that everyone said were from too much nightlife. They each had their dark secrets. Jr.s Angel intertwines the coach and the teacher as they reveal details of their pasts. The coach played a chess game with God for much of his life. As the game neared its end, the coach realized that God would always be the Winner. As though to make amends, God sent him the only woman Victor Wolf ever really loved. The file cabinet is nearly empty, although a few notes remain. Now I had begun to store my notes that covered twenty years of my life and adventures with my husband. As I filed some papers, I came across a book by one of Vics favorite authors, Ernest Hemingway. Hidden inside was a quote by Hemingway, Every mans life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another. This folded scrap of paper held a clue to Vics philosophy. Vic loved Hemingway because the man wrote about how he had experienced life. Vic knew the best fiction had to be based upon reality and experience. Vics notes and writings revealed how he lived life. But his life held sorrow and disappointment, until he met the woman who introduced him to the concept of love. Vics story had left many unanswered questions. This book fills in the missing gaps of many characters. Jr.s Angel is a tribute to love, a word that a tough guy couldnt speak until he fell under the influence of a little schoolteacher who had been abused and put in a corner. She survived somehow. Once she met the tough guy, she flourished. The two found each other: warrior and angel. Unselfish love and dedication allowed each to thrive. He became her true love and hero; she became his angel on this earth.

Surveying the development and varieties of blank verse in the English playhouses, this book is a natural history of iambic pentameter in English. Marina Tarlinskaja’s statistical analysis of versification focuses on Shakespeare, but places his work in the literary context of the times. Her results offer new ways to think about the dating of plays, the attribution of anonymous texts, and how collaborators divided their task in co-authored dramas.

A fully illustrated study of Shakespeare's awareness of traditions in visual art and their presence in his plays and poems.

In the NFL there is only one certainty: that every day, someone will have to be the Next Man Up. Football is an unrelentingly punishing sport, played and practiced at undiminished intensity, and it devours its players. Confronting injuries, trades, and the grim reality of competition, every NFL team prepares constantly for the likelihood -- the certainty -- that even franchise players can go down at any time. And someone new must be ready, trained, and primed to step in at the highest level. Bestselling sportswriter John Feinstein persuaded one NFL team to lift the extraordinary secrecy that shrouds the sport and let him see how a team operates at the closest level. One team let him join every practice, every coaches' meeting, every players' gathering, every strategy debate. From the give-and-take of draft day, into the grinder of summer training camps, and from 100-degree practice games to the last game in frigid conditions, Feinstein reveals how a football team works -- or fails to work -- as no writer has done before. Next Man Up unveils rituals (what a coach tells a player at the moment he cuts him); rules (the inanities of league-appointed "uniform Nazis"); conflicts (the scouts vs. the coaches, the general managers vs. the agents, the offense vs. the defense, the special teams coaches vs. everybody); money (how much a journeyman makes, and how his life differs from the multi-million-dollar-a-year star players)-every nuance of a team's life, from the owner's goals to the coach's day-to-day travails to the feeling of the sleet-soaked ball in the hands of a receiver on artificial turf. The access John Feinstein enjoyed allows him to discuss with equal understanding the owner's management strategy, the coaches' and coordinators' plans for each new game, and how it all affects the players themselves. Anyone who loves football -- any team, in any era -- will savor the thousands of details revealed here for the first time, and the extraordinary drama that goes into following week after week, the most sensational sport in America.